Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 41.djvu/281

 ‘servant of God’ named Berhtfrith, on condition that prayer should be offered there continually for the donor. 

NUNNELEY, THOMAS (1809–1870), surgeon, born at Market Harborough in March 1809, was son of John Nunneley, a gentleman of property in Leicestershire, who claimed descent from a Shropshire family. He was educated privately, and was apprenticed to a medical man in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire. He afterwards entered as a student at Guy's Hospital, where he became intimately acquainted with Sir [q. v.], and served as surgical dresser to Mr. Key. He was admitted a licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries on 12 July 1832, in the same year obtained the membership of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and in 1843 he was elected a fellow honoris causâ. As soon as he had obtained his license to practise, he went to Paris to increase his professional knowledge. He applied unsuccessfully for the office of house-surgeon to the Leeds General Infirmary on his return to England; but finding that an opportunity for practice offered itself in the town, he settled there, and was soon afterwards appointed surgeon to the Eye and Ear Hospital, a post he occupied for twenty years with eminent success. In the Leeds school of medicine he lectured on anatomy and physiology, and later on surgery, until 1866. He was appointed surgeon to the Leeds General Infirmary in 1864. For some years he was an active member of the Leeds town council. He died on 1 June 1870.

Nunneley was a surgeon who operated with equal ability, judgment, and skill, and is further remarkable as being one of the earliest surgeons outside London to devote himself to the special study of ophthalmic surgery in its scientific aspects. He was clear, vigorous, and logical as a writer, and of decisive character. These qualities made him a valuable professional witness in favour of (1825 [sic]–1856) [q. v.], who was convicted of poisoning J. P. Cook by strychnia in 1856, and against William Dove, who poisoned his wife with the same drug in the course of that same year.

Nunneley's chief work was ‘The Organs of Vision, their Anatomy and Physiology,’ London, 1858, 8vo. The book at the time it was published was of great value, but its sale was spoilt by adverse criticism in professional journals, which appears to have been due to personal animosity. Nunneley also published:
 * 1) ‘An Essay on Erysipelas,’ published in 1831, and reissued in 1841.
 * 2) ‘Anatomical Tables,’ London, 1838, 12mo.
 * 3) ‘On Anæsthesia and Anæsthetic Substances generally,’ Worcester, 1849, 8vo.

His portrait appears in ‘Photographs of eminent Medical Men,’ London, 1867, ii. 33. 

NUTHALL, THOMAS (d. 1775), politician and public official, was a native of the county of Norfolk. He became a solicitor, and held the appointments of registrar of warrants in the excise office (1740), and receiver-general for hackney coaches (1749). From a letter written by him from Crosby Square, London, on 30 May 1749, to Lord Townshend, it appears that he transacted that peer's legal business. He was also solicitor to the East India Company; on the retirement in July 1765 of Philip Carteret Webb he was appointed solicitor to the treasury; and he succeeded Webb in 1766, when Lord Northington ceased to be lord chancellor, in the post of secretary of bankrupts. Nuthall had been for many years intimately acquainted with Pitt, whose marriage settlements he had drawn up in 1754, and he attributed his promotions to the friendship of Pitt, his ‘great benefactor and patron.’ He added that he would resign his offices when called upon to ‘do anything that I can even surmise to be repugnant to your generous and constitutional principles.’ Many letters to and from him are in the ‘Chatham Correspondence’ (ii. 166 et seq.); he was addressed as ‘dear Nuthall,’ and he was the medium of the communications with Lord Rockingham in February 1766 for the restoration of Pitt to power. In 1772, however, in consequence of some errors in their private business, probably due to the multiplication of his official duties, Nuthall fell under the censure of that statesman and of Lord Temple, the latter of whom, when writing to Pitt, dubbed him ‘that facetious man of business in so many departments, Mr. Thomas Nuthall, whose fellow is not easily to be met with; witness your marriage-settlements not witnessed.’

Nuthall seems to have been in partnership with a solicitor called Skirrow at Lincoln's Inn in 1766. In the same year, as ranger of Enfield Chase, he devised a plan for saving its oak-woods for the construc-